April 17, 2006

Fathers who aren't really the fathers of their children

Anderson compared the paternity test results for men with high paternity confidence to the results for men with low paternity confidence in an effort to determine how perceptions of fatherhood correlate to fact. He found that, overall, men who were confident about their fatherhood going into the test were only wrong 1.7 percent of the time, that is, they were indeed the child's father more than 98 percent of the time. Men who were dubious about their fatherhood – specifically men who contested paternity through paternity tests – were more frequently not the father of the child, but only in 29.8 percent of cases. More than 70 percent of the time, men who doubted their paternity were wrong.

Anderson also organized the data geographically, breaking down nonpaternity rates in different countries according to high and low paternity confidence. Among those for who paternity confidence was relatively high, actual nonpaternity is highest in Mexico and lowest among the Kohanim lineages of Sephardic Jews.

More on this when the study appears in the Current Anthropology website.

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